GMU:Urban Development Kit/Organic City

Organic City / Reef City

After some thought I have decided that the aspect I’m most interested and fascinated by at the moment
is the translation of urban, geometric static forms into organic shapes.

What would a building look like, if it weren’t a human-build structure with strict constraints but a free flowing shape,
changing its form to adjust to its needs? What would maybe even a whole city look like?

To deal with these questions I have begun to research coral reefs. I consider them to be metropolises of the sea
as they provide a variety of organisms with food and shelter. Even though they cover less than 0.1 % of ocean surface,
they harbor 25 % of all marine species.

For this project I would like to try and “translate” a city (or part of a city) like Weimar into a reef-like structure and see,
what changes emerge through the organic shape-building. Maybe some of these realizations can even be of use
in the process of future urban development connected to global warming.

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  Anonymus Urban Ignorance Meeting

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  Idea Doodling

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  coral types

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  reef structure & polyp

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  on-map sketch

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  map sketch

Inspiration:

• architectural 1
• architectural 2
• Zaha Hadid Architects
• Katsumi Hhayakawa
• Louis Reith
• Tom Beddard (vid)
• Tom Beddard
• live vid of corals

ProSkin

“Protective Skin2” is about the history of a distant, dystopian future.

Through the chronological retelling of how that future came to be, the listener is shown why and in which way society changed.
The work evolved out of the thought of what would happen, if people couldn’t touch and therefore feel each other anymore.
How would this situation change people? What would be its consequence for society as a whole?

This work creates a scenario that manufactures and explores the idea of placing such constraints on people.
To make the dystopian world more tangible to the audience, it experiences a kind of old school history lesson
in which a disembodied narrator takes them through the last 100 years but doesn’t mention the current situation or date
as that is for the audience to the decide for themselves.

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These are some snippets from my slowly going work:

My second audio test: <flashmp3>udk lauraj proSkin audiotest.mp3</flashmp3>

After this test, I recorded the lecture text with an native English speaker.

And my images for the lecture are coming along, too.

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